A lot of you are forgetting that unlike other companies, Blizzard iterates games until they are in a good place. Having had a rough launch, they are definitely paying close attention to D3 and in their minds, they aren't going to let it fail or be a '6/10' game so long as players keep giving them the kind of feedback they can take and improve the game with.

We've already had two small patches, with a decent sized one coming.

Originally Posted by Jevlin

Why? Because fuck you, that's why.

Every time you have a question that begins with "Why?" that is about what other people prefer to do with their own goddamn time, come back here, and reread the first row of this post. That will ALWAYS be the answer to your question. Have a nice day.

I dunno... I'm having a ton of fun in D3 right now... Capable of farming Acts I-IV Inferno on my wizard at this point so now I'm making a DH and loving that as well.

I'm thinking there's a point in the game (Act 2 Inferno) where people get really frustrated because they can't advance any further without better gear. And then you farm... and in a few days you'll be back on track.

The drop rates were tuned for a player who would never use the Auction House. For the majority of internal development we didn't have an Auction House, we all played using our own drops only. I've personally leveled multiple characters from 1 to 60 internally before the game came out using only drops that I found - we all did.

For me its the whole Viable builds are only viable after either gold sinking, extreme rnd (yes RND/rand = random, from a coders perspective RNG has always meant ranged in my book) luck, or at least 100hours a week farming (something not all of us can do). A combination is probably more than likely the reality. After that I have a grip with the way one goes about the acts. I liked in d2 that at any point in a farm run I could just skip to a different act, in d3 I have to actually exit the game, change the quest, start the game before I can move on to farming. Not very fun In my book.

It took so long because they went through 3 seperate art direction style changes.

And every single gameplay element besides the isometric view and click-to-move was changed multiple times. They've basically built and rebuilt 3 or 4 different mediocre games into one (arguably) much better one.

D3, to me, is a decent game. And that right there is probably the problem. It's not that D3 is bad, it's just that it's not good as you hoped. You were expecting the second coming, and all you got was pizza. Pizza's great, sure, but it's not what you were expecting.

Ultimately they changed too little to make it stand out on it's own, possibly because they were afraid that if they changed too much, people would hate it. Which is... probably what would happen. They lose either way.

That is the inevitable cycle of the hype machine. Remember Duke Nukem Forever? Yeah...

The thing about the Second Coming is that we're not going to see it coming. If you go around expecting a game to the the Greatest Game of All Time, and it turns out to be just a good game, maybe even simply a great one, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Games that change the genre are only apparent after the genre has been changed. It's impossible to know whether that's the case within a month after release, much less years before it hits the shelves. D3 is D2 with some improvements, tweaks and a new storyline. D2 was a great game. D3 is also a great game. But "great" isn't good enough for the imagination. If it cured leprosy and made blind men see, it might begin to live up to the hype, but it doesn't do those things. It's just Diablo.

It took so long because they went through 3 seperate art direction style changes.

Their problem was that they did not know which direction they wanted to take the game in. Can be quite hard filling in other people's shoes, sometimes. Still, I think they did a great job at several things, so they succeeded in my eyes.

For me its the whole Viable builds are only viable after either gold sinking, extreme rnd (yes RND/rand = random, from a coders perspective RNG has always meant ranged in my book) luck, or at least 100hours a week farming (something not all of us can do). A combination is probably more than likely the reality. After that I have a grip with the way one goes about the acts. I liked in d2 that at any point in a farm run I could just skip to a different act, in d3 I have to actually exit the game, change the quest, start the game before I can move on to farming. Not very fun In my book.

this is one of few things that makes my nose itch.
Not a major problem but I would have preferred the other way considering how much they wanted to go with "no bosses but kill stuff around"